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Comment by MathCodeLove | Hacker News Reader

If you’re spending the time applying and submitting something then you might as well spend the extra 30 minutes or so to do it right, no?

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Any time someone says ‘should only take a few hours’ they’re far underestimating the time it actually takes.

It's never been 30 minutes for me. Even leetcode timed exams tended to be 60-90 minutes.

recently I spent a good 10 hours making a crossword solver. Hiring freeze a few days after I turned it in. I completely get GP's mentality.

Not if you’re applying to hundreds, or thousands of jobs. Unless you know someone, it’s a quantity game.

I’ve screened a lot of resumes and given a lot of interviews over the years, and it’s usually obvious when people are trying the scattershot approach, they just don’t match. I feel like treating it like a quantity game is unlikely to improve your odds, and tbh spamming out hundreds or thousands of applications sounds like a miserable way to spend time. You could spend that time meeting and talking to people. I’ve never applied to more than 2 jobs at once, jobs that I actually want, and never had trouble getting at least one of them (and it still takes time and effort and some coding and interviews).

It wouldn’t be obvious they’re using a scattershot approach when they’re a good match, though. I don’t see the downside.

Maybe not at the resume screening phase, but it’s usually still obvious once the interviews start when people aren’t interested in your specific company. Some people get lucky, sure, but the downside is that you have to get lucky, it’s wasting valuable time on low probability events. If you’re familiar with the statistical process of importance sampling, in my experience on both sides of the interview table, it’s effective and worthwhile to spend more time curating higher quality samples than to scatter and hope.

>but it’s usually still obvious once the interviews start when people aren’t interested in your specific company.

Can you really blame them? If you're not a houshold name, why would you expect someone to spend hours researching your specific company?

On the other hand, it can come off as creepy if your a small company and suddenly someone nerds out about how your CEO said this one thing at a talk years ago and knows your lead has cancer based on his personal blog. I'd rather just treat it as a transaction of my skills and services for money. We are not a family (multiple layoffs have taught me so)

> it’s effective and worthwhile to spend more time curating higher quality samples than to scatter and hope.

Not in this market. Too many ghost jobs, too many people ghosting after multiple rounds. Too many hiring freezes when you spend a month talking with a company. If you want respect from candidates, don't disrespect them.

Naw I don’t blame them. I’m not suggesting anyone spend hours researching each company. And I don’t expect candidates to do anything, I’m saying the candidates who do are the ones that tend to land the job, but it’s entirely the candidate’s choice. All it takes is minutes, really.

You sound like you’ve been burned. That sucks and I’m sorry, I sympathize. I’m hearing that the job market is very tough right now. A big part of that is because it’s extremely competitive. Taking it personally and assuming it’s disrespect isn’t going to help get the job though (even if there was disrespect… but that’s not the only explanation, so it’s a dangerous assumption).

>I’m saying the candidates who do are the ones that tend to land the job, but it’s entirely the candidate’s choice. All it takes is minutes, really.

Well, everyone has different experiences. I never felt like knowing about a company put me ahead in my early days. I guess I have a dump stat in Charisma (not surprised).

Like you said, the market is competitive. No one's going to take the nice guy over the one who blitz's an interview unless that nice guy has connections. Those few minutes of thousands of applications adds up to days of research. I just lack that time and energy these days.

>You sound like you’ve been burned. That sucks and I’m sorry, I sympathize.

several times, yes. It's honestly worse than my first job search out of college 10 years ago.

>Taking it personally and assuming it’s disrespect isn’t going to help get the job though

I only ask for basic decency. Keep a candidate in the loop, don't drag the process on for the sake of it, any take home should warrant a response (even if it's a template rejection letter). i.e. respect people's time.

I haven't been burned in a lot of my interviews, I'm not talking about bummers like the several times I was interviewing before a hiring freeze. I don't even treat non-responses as an interview process. But several of them just end with absolutely no communication nor closure after speaking for weeks with recruiters and hiring managers.

I don't know what to call that in a day and age where AI is supposedly increasing efficiency, other than disrespect. This has never happened before 2023, which makes the times all the more weirder.

My experience is that I've applied to companies where I was a perfect fit, but did not get an interview, and then I've applied to companies where I had not used any of the tech stack and still got an interview... There's a lot of wierd reason, one common is that they want to hire a specific person, maybe even in the company already, but they still need to post a job ad due to company policy. Or one where I got an interview even though I had no experience in their tech stack they explained they need to make at least 5 interviews before they hire and they had already found their guy so they interviewed other non qualified so that their candidate/friend would stand out as the most qualified... So never take hiring personally. It's just random. Do enough work to get an interview, many employers are very good at judging if you will fit in or not, so just leave it for them to figure that out, and be yourself. And don't take it personally when you get rejected. There's still a shortage of experienced software engineers, and lots of jobs to apply to Also if you get a bad feeling, just back out. It's when you've started turning down offers you have become good enough at searching/interviewing, and that's when you will find something great. Try to have at least 3 offers before you accept one.

You don’t understand reality. If all companies have 1000 candidates your only approach is scattershot.

The only time the bespoke approach works is if you have like 30 candidates only. But then there are still issues here because the candidate is still one in thirty so if he does a bespoke approach 30 times it takes an inordinate amount of time.

That’s not reality. Not all companies have 1000 candidates. Not all companies have even 30 candidates.

This is the reality nowadays. There's an abundance of candidates thanks to bootcamps.

Got any evidence to share? It’s simply not true that “all” companies get a thousand applicants, whether you mean per job or total. Startups aren’t inundated with applicants. Neither are schools or hospitals or most web design shops or hundreds of other non-tech places that employ programmers. Some of the biggest tech names do get a lot of applicants, sometimes, for certain jobs, but I suspect you’re probably ignoring the majority of non-FAANG type businesses. Kids are definitely disproportionately aiming for the jobs that they’ve heard stories about paying really well, like AI and Apple, Facebook, Nvidia, etc. Those jobs can be super competitive, and they generally just don’t hire from bootcamps. Spamming entry level bootcamp resumes at big tech companies isn’t going to improve anyone’s odds much or at all, but whatever you don’t have to take my word for it.

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